December 2001

- This is one of those unusual books that manages to convey highly technical information in a very readable and understandable way. At my very first reading, I thought it was a little disjointed; it felt like the chapters were somehow out of order. However, after going back for a second time, I then thought that the order made perfect sense.

- Another winner from No Starch Press, who's motto is "more stuff, less fluff". This is the most practical daily use Linux book I've seen so far- highly recommended for anyone getting started with Linux.

- The number of viruses that attack windows systems is incredible. Virus scanning is costly, and can't guarantee 100% safety: if you get a virus before the scanners know about it, they will let it pass unchallenged.

- This is not a performance tuning article. If your system is always slow, this article may not be what you are looking for. I'll be covering some general performance related issues here, but the main focus is for the system that was running fine yesterday but is sucking mud today. The typical response to such problems is "Reboot it", and while that may indeed fix the problem, it does not address the root cause, so you are likely to have the situation again.

- It's an unfortunate fact that many programmers are lazy about error messages. Very often, all you get is a cryptic "Error 5", and you may be lucky to get that: sometimes all you get is an error return that you have to examine yourself with "echo $?". You can't even depend on that being the actual Unix error, but even if it is, what does it mean?